1. BlackBerry Bold 9000 and BlackBerry Bold 9700
I went through two Bold 9000’s. The trackball on both of them ended up becoming completely unusable. My friend also owned a 9000 (owns a new one now) – the standby button broke and then later on the trackball went as well. My dad also had a 9000 work phone – the trackball went on it. I thought that the Bold 9700 would remedy my issue, since it does away with the trackball. Well, the tracking is no longer an issue, but after a couple months of use my screen randomly goes all effed up; that’s the only way I can describe it – here’s an image. On the other hand, I’ve owned an iPod Touch 2g since before my first BlackBerry, and I have never had an issue with it, and the App Store completely destroys BlackBerry App World. Needless to say, I plan on getting an iPhone 4 in the coming months.
2. Razer Mamba
Before I purchased this $160 mouse I read countless consumer and professional reviews, all of which stated this mouse was the second (first) coming of Jesus Christ, more or less. It’s an OK mouse, but I wouldn’t pay more than $50 for it. When in wireless mode, the battery lasts about 5 hours. Even in wired mode, I occasionally (not often) experience a complete loss of mouse movement, and I need to unplug the mouse and plug it back in – it’s a software issue, not a USB cable or power issue. Speaking of software, the Razer control panel is a piece of garbage. Profile management is completely broken; in order to add a profile I ended up having to add a text entry in one of the .ini files. After having more than one profile, I realized the auto-switch upon loading a game rarely works, and if it does work it doesn’t auto-switch back when the game is closed. The macro functionality doesn’t work either, at all. I can’t describe how utterly useless this Razer control panel is. What I can do is change what every button does, change the dpi and scroll sensitivity, polling rates, and lighting. There is an on-the-fly display for the DPI settings; unfortunately, it doesn’t overlay on top of DirectShow – i.e. you can’t see it while playing any games. The button location for DPI changing is at the top left of the mouse. Half of the time I find myself left clicking while I stretch my index finger over the top to change the DPI settings, even after months of practice. On my old Habu, the DPI buttons were behind the scroll wheel – a perfect fricking location. On top of all that, when I restart my computer the DPI setting defaults back to 5600 DPI. That being said, the mouse looks awesome, and I am convinced most reviewers are deceived by the eye candy and the amount of money they blew on it. No one wants to admit they wasted money. Please don’t buy this mouse.
3. Nintendo Wii
Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out and I wanted it bad. I bought a Wii, a couple controllers, and Brawl. It was an impulse purchase. After a month of Brawl I was bored. I ordered a mod chip – and I did enjoy installing it and troubleshooting my problems – probably the most fun I’ve had with my Wii. Anyway, I downloaded loads of games, the only one I liked was Super Mario Galaxy. A couple months ago my friend told me about how he had all his Wii games running off of an external hard drive. I bought a new external to do the same for my Wii. I downloaded loads of games again, about 25 in total. I thoroughly enjoyed New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I also enjoyed Super Mario Galaxy 2, although I haven’t played very much of it. All the games I have downloaded are considered the “best of the best”, or “crem de la crem” for you Frenchies out there, and I like about 4/25 of them. Needless to say, the Wii sucks because almost all of the games suck, really, really bad.
4. TI-83 Plus
I can’t believe high schools force students to buy these over priced, out dated, massive pieces of shit. For $100 you get a 96×64 monochrome screen, a 6MHz processor, 512KB of ROM (of which about 350KB are used by the OS), and I think they might give you 4 AAA batteries in the box if you’re lucky. Hell, if you already own an iPod Touch or iPhone you can get a virtual TI-83 from the App Store. For $220 the Touch will get you a 480×320 LCD screen, 833 MHz processor, 256MB of DRAM, 8GB of storage, internal Lion battery, and all the other shenanigans like Wifi and Bluetooth. Oh, and it comes with a cable to connect it to your computer – you have to order one separately for the TI-83.
